Redesign

Posted: Mon 7 January, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Weirdness | 2 Comments »

No, not here.

I noticed the other day though that my bank had decided to arbitrarily redesign their online banking log-on area, so that it looked very different from how it used to, yet they hadn’t said anything about it.

Now, when everyone’s banging on about identity theft and phishing scams that direct you to copies of banking sites etc. and get you to add in all your normal log-in details, don’t you think it would’ve been smart to actually let their customers know that they were redesigning it, rather than just doing it and pushing it out to the world? Particularly in the week before Christmas, when customers are likely to

  1. be using the site more often
  2. be rather more sensitive than usual to the risk of losing their details/money to some phishing scumbag scammer?

I spoke to their customer services department about it – partly because I wanted to verify I wasn’t falling to some DNS-redirection hack or whatever, but mainly because it just struck me as such a monumentally fucking stupid thing to do – and their response was

Oh yes, I suppose we should’ve done that, shouldn’t we? Oh well, too late now.

Admittedly, I’m paraphrasing slightly – but not by much. The first sentence is verbatim, the second is paraphrased.

Night Driving

Posted: Wed 12 December, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Cynicism, Driving, Thoughts, Travel, Weirdness | 6 Comments »

As the nights have drawn in, I’ve found myself repeatedly thinking about driving standards. In particular, with regard to the way people now use their headlights.

When I was younger, and also when I was taking (lots of) driving lessons, I always thought that before you used full (or even dipped) headlights, you first used sidelights only – kind of a “for being seen, not for seeing by” thing. They got used ’til you needed to turn on the headlights/dipped headlights in order to see.

Now though it seems like the majority of people just switch straight to full headlights, without ever really using the sidelights at all. The Highway Code suggests that it should still be done with the sidelights first, then headlights – but it just doesn’t seem to be the done thing any more.

Now when did that start happening Or is it just something I hadn’t noticed until recently?

Oral Fixation

Posted: Fri 23 November, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Travel, Weirdness | 3 Comments »

I think I may have written about this before, but it happened again today so sod it, I’ll write about it again.

On my commute, there’s a guy who also regularly catches the same train. He is – let’s be tactful – slightly odd. He’s probably the same age as me, maybe even a bit older. Throughout the journey, he will sit, using his Blackberry phone/email thing. Well, I say using it – but most of the time he appears to just sit and read whatever’s on there. No replies, no real interaction that I spot, just (I assume) reading whatever’s on the screen. I suppose it could be a film or whatever – I don’t know if you can play videos on a Blackberry, for one thing – but equally he’s playing music through headphones from his iPod, so I kind of doubt it. I dunno.

But all the while he’s using the Blackberry, he’s also sucking his thumb. And that, to me, is definitely odd. It jars, seeing a grown man sucking his thumb. Sure, it’s a harmless thing to be doing – and far less offensive than the other people I see picking their noses or whatever – but the thumbsucker is (for me) a stand-out in the day-to-day routine and oddnenss.

Phantom Limb Syndrome

Posted: Tue 20 November, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Own Business, Travel, Weirdness, Work-related | Leave a comment »

Last night, like the twat I am I managed to leave my laptop in the office. I blame being busy at work, and packing away the work laptop when getting ready to head for home. Oh, and being a twat, of course.

It’s been weird though – particularly whilst travelling home last night, and back to work this morning – not having the laptop around. You see, that’s now what I do most of my work on, and I do a fair amount of that work while travelling, so it’s been deeply noticeable to me that I’m missing out on some work time.

Of course, that’s a good thing in some ways. But I’ve got a lot on at the moment, and missing out on 2ish hours of work is noticeable, and I’d rather be doing the work than not. And sad though it sounds, I do rather feel like I’m missing some significant part of me – which is probably a big sign that I need to get out more and/or work less. Or something. (Not that the latter is likely to happen any time soon, I should point out)

Shortages

Posted: Thu 15 November, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Weirdness | 4 Comments »

How on earth does a decent-sized “one-stop shop” run out of Coke? (As in Coca-Cola®, not coal or dodgy white powder from Columbia) Even more relevantly, how do two similar shops run out of Coke?

That’s what happened this morning – I went in to the normal place to pick up a couple of bottles, and nothing. No Coke, diet coke, coke zero, or even the diet stuff with lime. Plenty of Cherry coke, but that’s because it’s disgusting, and no fucker ever buys it.

So I nipped over the road to the other place. Same story.

How? The mind boggles.

Madness

Posted: Wed 14 November, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Animals, Weirdness | 1 Comment »

This story on the BBC has improved my mood considerably – it’s always good to know that we’re not the maddest people in the country.

In this case, well, despite Psycho Cat’s greatest idiosyncracies at least we don’t end up going in the car to collect him from his latest wanderings.

Renewal of Mail Redirection

Posted: Mon 12 November, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, D4D™, Weirdness | Leave a comment »

Over the weekend, I got the usual letter from Royal Mail about continuing my mail redirection from Attleborough to the new house. Now, I know that the process is a simple one – albeit one that seems to cause a lot of people problems. D4D™ comes up second (at the moment) if you type the renewal address (www.royalmail.com/renewal) into your google search window, rather than into the address bar in a web browser.

And lo, once I’d typed in the address in the correct place, all went smoothly. Most of my mail is already coming to the correct place, so it’s not a big hassle anyway, but I’ve renewed for another three months just to make sure. It took about five minutes all told, which isn’t bad at all – and is certainly better than taking a week to process…

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